I don’t talk too much about my faith on this blog. Maybe a post here or there. Maybe a mention about church every once in a while. The main reason for that is although I am a Christian, this isn’t a Christian blog. I don’t assume everyone who reads it has the same faith that I do. I am like that in person too. I have my faith but I don’t assume everyone else believes like I do.
Another reason for that is that I don’t consider myself a “Conservative Christian.” Don’t get me wrong, I have a VERY strong belief in Jesus, God and the Bible. I was raised in a Christian home and have gone to church pretty much my entire life. The only two times in my life I didn’t go to church regularly was when I was a senior year of high school and a lot of the time in Germany because of being without a husband and not fully connecting with the chapel services. Although in Germany I was pretty active in PWOC.
I was raised in a Presbyterian church. Ben and I are members of a Presbyterian church in California. We now attend a United Methodist church. These two churches are where I feel most at home at. I feel torn on the predestination issue which is one of the biggest differences between Presbyterians and Methodists. It also has to do with location a bit. Where we lived in CA the Methodist churches are pretty liberal. Too liberal for us. In Tennessee it isn’t that way and we also couldn’t find too many Presbyterian churches here.
I feel like for the last few years I have been searching. Not searching for Jesus, I have already found him. But searching for what it really means to be a Christian. Searching to know what I need to believe about X. Y and Z. I have seen a lot of crap happen in Christian churches. Stuff that makes me sad and feel icky inside. Stuff that had my own personal faith not been so strong, I probably would have walked away.
A few months ago I came across Rachel Held Evans blog and was amazed! I can relate to so much of what she says. I read her first book, Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All the Answers Learned to Ask the Questions
and found it SO interesting. So when I saw on her blog they were asking for bloggers to review her newest book and be apart of a Facebook group, I applied. I wasn’t sure if I would get in or not. I wasn’t sure how many other people would apply or what type of people they were looking for. But I got in! I was so excited! I AM so excited to be apart of her book launch.
You can purchase A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master”
What is “biblical womanhood” . . . really?
Strong-willed and independent, Rachel Held Evans couldn’t sew a button on a blouse before she embarked on a radical life experiment—a year of biblical womanhood. Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.
Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.
See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as “master” and “praises him at the city gate” with a homemade sign. Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife. Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women.
With just the right mixture of humor and insight, compassion and incredulity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor.
Here is a video about the book…
I am on chapter two and it is pretty interesting so far 🙂
I will be blogging about it here and there over the next few weeks 🙂
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Image courtesy of [graur razvan ionut] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
